Growing Pains, 1984, the year innocence ended.

In 1984, I was 14 years old.

I was living in a little Melbourne suburb in the north-east called Viewbank.

Our suburb backed onto the Watsonia Army Barracks. Once a year they held open days with paratroopers, tanks and soldiers staging mock battles. It was simply on the calendar as something to do. The barracks also had a large satellite dish and we were told it would be a target in the event of war.

On the other side sat the Australian Radiation Laboratory. Our local versions of Homer Simpson worked there.

I had a full chrome moly Supergoose Mongoose with yellow Tuff Wheels and an Atari loaded with Space Invaders and Frogger.

I loved the music of Tears for Fears, Bruce Springsteen, Prince, Talking Heads and The Doors.

Mum worked promotions at a local nightclub and was often out at night. My older brother had a girlfriend and was spending more and more time at her place, so I often found myself home alone.

Sometimes I'd hear the house creak as the cold night air settled around it.

I scared myself.

Around that time I'd also become obsessed with archery. I owned a 70-pound compound bow for hunting rabbits.

Our street was a dead end and, after climbing a barbed wire fence, you were no longer really in suburbia. You could disappear for hours through farms, pony clubs and manicured golf courses. Council had approved a new housing estate though, and the occasional skeleton frame of a half-built house could still spook you in the moonlight.

One night, hiding in my bedroom and convinced there were noises in the roof, I grabbed my bow and arrow and pointed it at the manhole.

"I know you're up there," I declared in my deepest pubescent voice.

"I've got a bow and arrow and I'm not afraid to use it!"

I growled my threats into the groaning silence of our little brick veneer home.

Then I made the mistake of going outside to see if any of the roof tiles had moved.

Self-sabotage.

Because suddenly I realised they could have climbed into the house while I was outside.

So I had to search every room, every cupboard and every wardrobe, bow and arrow in hand.

Around that same time, I remember climbing into the skeleton frame of one of those new houses one night and lying beneath its unfinished roof, staring into a cloudless sky. Nobody knew I was there. What if I fell? Mum was at work. My brother was at his girlfriend's.

I could die here.

Looking back now, those moments felt like quiet initiations into adulthood. I remember lying there under the stars and experiencing one of my first existential awareness moments.

I exist.

I don't want to die.

But I feel lonely and alone.

Nobody can see me.

I felt invisible. It was terrifying. 

Around that same time I had a recurring nightmare about nuclear holocaust.

In the dream I'd be sitting on the roof of our house, simply watching a mushroom cloud slowly getting closer.

In hindsight it makes perfect sense. Puberty is a transition into the unknown. Of course my imagination dressed that uncertainty in the biggest fears it could find.

Around that time Melbourne was hit by a massive dust storm. The sky turned red. The sun disappeared and day became night.

At school we were reading Hiroshima in English class. The Cold War was in full swing. The USA and the Soviet Union seemed locked in an endless nuclear arms race.

I remember bomb drills at school.

To an imaginative fourteen-year-old, it was arresting.

Enter Simone.

She went to Macleod High School, from memory. She had the perfect blonde bob haircut and the cutest face.

A group of us went to see Purple Rain at the cinema. I carefully positioned myself beside Simone. I think it took me three half-attempts before I finally built up the courage to put my arm around her shoulders.

Thankfully...

She smiled.

We never kissed. I wasn't that cool.

Instead we danced that awkward teenage dance of "Does she like me? I don't know... maybe... no... maybe..."

Eventually we drifted apart before the tension could be resolved. 

The pangs and uncertainty of first love pulled, picked and bowed my heart like a violin string.

Years later, while writing Airport Departure Lounge and thinking deeply about liminal spaces, departures and transitions, these memories came flooding back.

Growing Pains was born.

I'm incredibly proud of this song because it's the only completely autobiographical story on the album.

Most of Airport Departure Lounge grew from fictional break-ups and departures, but it was also informed by my growing discomfort with the rise of surveillance culture, algorithmic reality and authoritarian politics in places I'd once idealised. Reading Christopher Wylie's Mindfck* helped bring into focus many of the subtle shifts I'd been noticing in social media and public life.

Growing Pains became the exception.

Every name is real.

Every memory happened.

It's funny too that so much of the album circles around themes George Orwell explored in Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel coincidentally set in... 1984.

Which brings me to one last story.

One night Mum had brought home a small gathering of cops, robbers and nightclub friends. Men at Work and Lionel Richie were blasting through the house well into the early hours.

At around three in the morning, a man I'd never met wandered into my bedroom.

His name, I later learned, was Dieter. A German architect.

He stood over my bed.

I could smell the whisky and cigarettes on his breath.

"Your mum tells me you're a reader."

His voice unnerved me. The alcoholic slur, the dryness of heavy smoking, his German accent and the intensity of his delivery combined into something genuinely frightening.

I sat bolt upright.

"You must read Nineteen Eighty-Four."

He almost shouted it.

Then he repeated himself.

"You must read Nineteen Eighty-Four."

Thankfully Mum appeared and dragged him out of my bedroom.

I didn't sleep again that night.

The next day Dieter returned, completely sober and enormously apologetic. He handed me a copy of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

I still have that book.

My life changed forever.

There are so many people who helped bring this song to life.

Firstly, my collaborator Cameron Spike-Porter, whose cinematic approach to composition and arrangement gives me goosebumps every single time.

Grant Gerrathy, whose batterie, tone, groove and musicality make phrasing and emotional delivery feel effortless.

Jordan Power for another beautiful mastering job.

For the video, Andy Bowles for the incredible live footage from The Rails in Byron Bay, and to the band and everyone in the audience who made that night feel so special.

A huge thank you to Vanessa Dodman, who patiently crafted the paper doll paratroopers, little town and mushroom cloud. I would have loved to make the entire clip in that style. Maybe in an alternate reality where I'd been signed to a major label in the MTV era, we'd have had that budget. Thank you, Vanessa.

And finally, heartfelt thanks to Cassidy Curnow, who directed and filmed the little horror sequence at the centre of the video, starring her younger brother Sam Curnow.

You guys absolutely nailed it.

Without further ado...

Here's Growing Pains. Out tonight on YouTube just before the stroke of Midnight for any night owls still awake and looking for entertainment.

And the track itself will be available around that same time where ever you stream your music.

I hope somewhere in these memories you find a few of your own.

With heart,

Andy